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HomeMy WebLinkAboutMinutes - 20050824APPROVED 11/15/2005 MINUTES ORANGE COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS Public Hearing on the Structure of the Board of County Commissioners August 24, 2005 7:30 p.m. The Orange County Board of Commissioners met for a Public Hearing on the Structure of the Board of County Commissioners on Wednesday, August 24, 2005 at 7:30 p.m. at the Southern Human Services Center, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. COUNTY COMMISSIONERS PRESENT: Chair Moses Carey, and Commissioners Valerie P. Faushee, Alice M. Gordon, Stephen Halkiatis and Barry Jacobs COUNTY COMMISSIONERS ABSENT: COUNTY ATTORNEYS PRESENT: Geoffrey Gledhill and S. Sean Borhanian COUNTY STAFF PRESENT: County Manager John M. Link, Jr., Assistant County Managers Rod Visser and Gwen Harvey and Clerk to the Board Donna S. Baker {All other staff members will be identified appropriately below) NOTE: MEETING Call to Order Chair Carey called the meeting to order and said this is the first of two public hearings on the subject of district representation of County Commissioners in Orange County. The next meeting will be held on August 31, 2005 in Hillsborough. Tonight we ask you to sign up on list in the back of the room if you would to speak. This is our opportunity to listen to you about the issue we are considering. There is some information in the back of the room you might want to see including a list of options Chair Carey developed for consideration by the Board and other members of the public. We look forward to hearing what you say about the subject and invite you to share your views with the Board. 2. Opening Comments by Board Members Commissioner Gordon thanked everyone for coming and asked that when they speak they identify which township they are from and if they have changes they would like to see to please explain what they hope to accomplish by the changes. 3. Staff Update Presentation Geof Gledhill said this is the first of two public hearings to hear from the public about the idea of changing the structure of the Board of County Commissioners. He said that everything in the agenda packet is on the Orange County website and may also be obtained through the Clerk's office or the Manager's Office. Most of the attachments with the agenda relate to questions and comments that came up during the May 5t" work session and they also include the options that Chair Carey has put before the public to comment on. He said that at May 5t" work session there was a report on the different options available to the counties by the general law, the options being used across North Carolina by the other 99 counties, and the history of this issue in Orange County. There was also some statistical information that is in part relevant to questions that would have to be addressed if the County Commissioners were to put before the voters a referendum on some kind of district form of election that is related to one person, one vote requirement of the United States Constitution. Geof Gledhill said that the questions were posed by the Board at the May 5t" meeting and the staff has tried to answer those questions in the information in the packets. He said that the three options from Chair Carey are each a variation of one option that is available under the general law. This means that if the Board were to select one of these methods to bring before the voters, the process would include a resolution to the County Commissioners followed by a referendum of the voters as to whether or not to make the changes. Chair Carey said that the three options he has proposed are not intended to draw district lines at this point. If any of them were selected, the lines still would have to be drawn to maintain the constitutional requirement for one person, one vote. However, the option for districts that are included with the selection in the district in the primary and involve election in the general election tries to achieve some of the objectives that have been heard in the past. He said that the concern is to maintain the constitutionality of any option that might be considered as well as trying to address some of the concerns that have been raised by members of the public who have been proponents of a change. The intent is to focus on the model and not on any lines in particular. 4. Public Comments Artie Franklin said he lives in Chapel Hill Township and he thanked the Board for the opportunity to comment on the disproportional representation that exists on Board. He said that the current election method in all three official options insure that a hypothetical Commissioner from Cedar Grove will seriously consider the parochial concerns of those in Chapel Hill and Carrboro while insulating the Commissioner from Chapel Hill and Carrboro from considering any of the concerns in Cedar Grove. After reviewing the official options, it seems we disagree on the solution, the problem, and at least partially on its causes. The problem is at least one-third of Orange County's residents are under-represented on the Board of County Commissioners. This disproportional representation is caused by a combination of population concentration and at-large voting. Population concentration plus at-large voting equals under-representation. Proportional representation is the best solution to Orange County's under- representation problem. It could insure election by simple majority rather than by plurality. It could accommodate at-large voting. Proportional representation would provide the opportunity for meaningful representation to all Orange County residents. Its primary disadvantages are that it has been criticized as too complicated and that it is not used in the United States. Proportional representation is used in Cambridge, Massachusetts and in my opinion if they can figure it out up there then we can too. The positive aspect of the official options provided this evening is that election by simple majority replaces election by plurality in Options 1 and 2 and to a substantial degree in Option 3. But the proportional representation formula (population concentration plus at-large voting equals under representation) remains intact. He said that on the negative side, the official options offer no solutions to the problem of disproportional representation on the Board of County commissioners. Instead they maintain partisan interests and other special interests at the expense of the Democratic principles of participatory and broadly representative government. There are additional opportunities to provide meaningful representation to Orange County residents, even using more familiar election methods. He asked the Board to please open this process to include additional options that directly address the issue of disproportional representation. He asked the Board to also please provide meaningful representation to the one-third of Orange County citizens who are under represented by the current election system and who will remain under represented under any of the official 3 options provided. Jean Earnhardt lives in Chapel Hill Township on the outer fringes of Carrboro's ETJ. She said that there must be some changes made and she leaves changes to the experts. She thinks that the flip side of the majority of the population living in southern Orange is that the majority of the property is in the northern Orange and that property is very under represented. She said she wishes that the Board were here tonight not to decide whether or not to change the system but to decide how best to change the system. Will Raymond is a resident of Chapel Hill and he applauds the intent of tonight's meeting. He would like to see the elections be opened up and made more representational. He said that if the intent of Mr. Faison and the 1200 petitioners is to improve Orange County's electoral representation, he suggests that instead of adopting the current proposal as codified by 15258-3B that we start over and make some changes based on a few key principles. He said that his first intent is to make the voting process as convenient as reasonable. He believes super precincts would promote greater involvement by the UNC student body but also in rural voters. He has worked with UNC students and has assisted students in locating their polling places and has visited a number of those polls on Election Day. Many of the students were confused and had difficulty locating the polling places and of the polling places many of the locations were greatly underutilized. To avoid this confusion, many students chose early voting at Morehead Planetarium which basically stretched it way beyond its capacity, and calls to the Board of Elections really did not resolve that issue. This trend was true in both municipal and national elections. Greater freedom to choose the mast convenient polling place should eliminate many of these problems. Also during the last general election super precincts in the rural areas might have improved the turnout. As a poll sitter at Caldwell, he said a number of voters were not sure where they should vote. One voter with a small infant had to travel about 30 miles that day being bounced between three different precincts but she did make her vote. The second intent is to make the vote as representational as possible. There are a number of voting systems such as proportional, cumulative, instant run off, and range based that do a better job of representing the will of the people, especially the minority, than our current binary winner-take-all system. He suggested that the Board be bold and pick a voting system that adequately represents the will of the all our voting citizens. And finally he said he thinks that the intent should be to have the widest possible candidate pool. He thinks that it is interesting that we are talking about this on the day that the Libertarian Party was disbanded. He said he is not a Libertarian but he thinks it is improper to disenfranchise citizens just because of their political affiliation. So he calls on the Board to be brave and to create a system with the widest possible pool of candidates whether they are Green, Libertarian, Republican, Democrat, ar Independent we need to draw from the widest passible pool of qualified candidates. National polls have showed a marked increase in the number of people who have self-identified as Independents and now is the time to accommodate that trend. He said he concurs with the intent but he suggests that the Board revisit it in light of these three principles. Vern Miller lives in Caldwell Community in the Little River Township. He said to Commissioner Foushee that there was an opening in the county's Planning Board before Commissioner Foushee was elected, and although he and another Caldwell Community person applied it was filled by the Board, as much as a year later, with a person who is not a native of Orange County. He feels that he is not represented in his community and although he pays taxes and is subject to ordinances that he does not agree with, he feels that he does not have a voice. Commissioner Gordan asked him to state what he would like far the Board to consider. Mr. Miller said he would like to be able to vote for a person in his district that they pick to represent them. He would like this person to be someone he might run into at the store. He said that it doesn't matter who it is just that it be a person he could talk to once in a while as it might have happened years ago. He urges the greater population of Chapel Hill, and he said that they would always have voting power in the elections, to help get out the word and persuade the Board of County Commissioners to vote in a type of representation that districts can elect their awn representatives and have a voice. Dan Coleman lives in Carrbaro and he agrees with idea that they can use more diversity on the Board of County Commissioners. And whether they elect the political diversity that is at the root of all the complaints about the current system, having a system that allows more diversity is worthwhile. He agrees with Chair Carey about not going in a direction that fosters divisiveness across the county. He thinks the solution would be a system of cumulative voting because cumulative encourages citizens to seek allies across the political spectrum across geographical divides but still allows significant minorities to elect representation to office. He said that he hopes if changes are considered that cumulative voting will be given very serious consideration. It goes beyond just allowing geographical regions to have representation and it goes to the heart of the matter which allows citizens to self-identify themselves according to whatever criteria they consider valid and to then organize around those constituencies to attempt to elect representation to all of us. He said that for cumulative voting to be effective it might make sense to enlarge the board to 7 members only because if you want to think about haw a majority might hold together in its preferences under that kind of system and where a minority aggregation of votes might begin to gain same traction. An election with 3-4 seats open allows those possibilities better than our current system would. The final point that he wanted to make is the consideration of having County Commissioners' elections become non-partisan. He said that he is not sure if there are any legal ramifications under the state law. He remembers one particular experience in1990 when voters asked him about what County Commissioners did and who they were because they were only interested in the Presidential Election. The partisan division doesn't serve us well in terms of allowing a debate about county issues to be continued through Election Day. 5. Closing Comments by Bvard Members John Link asked Geof Gledhill if it would take local legislation to do proportional elections. Geof Gledhill said that in proportional voting that cumulative voting and non- partisan elections would require legislation. The meeting adjourned at 7:55 p.m Moses Carey, Jr. Chair Donna S. Baker, CMC Clerk to the Board